This paper offers a partial defence of the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies. Unlike Epicurus and his present-day advocates, this defence relies not on a hedonistic or empiricist conception of value but on the concept of ‘existential’ value. Existential value is agent-relative value for which it is constitutive that it can be truly self-ascribed in the first person and present tense. From this definition, it follows that death (post-mortem non-existence), while perhaps bad in (...) some respects, cannot be an existential harm for the one who dies. This paper argues that existential goods are central to any explanation of why life appears good to us from a self-interested perspective, which means that death is not bad in the very respect in which life is most saliently good (from that perspective). A corresponding error theory shows why this truth is easily overlooked and explains why we tend to think that death is significantly worse than it really is. (shrink)

A familiar Epicurean argument for the conclusion that death is not bad for those who die goes like this. The dead cannot experience anything, including being dead and its effects. But something is bad for an individual only if that person can experience it or its effects. Therefore, death is not bad for those who die. In this article, I consider several alleged counterexamples to this argument's second premise, along with some responses to them. The responses are not entirely without (...) merit, as we will see. However, I contend that even if none of the cases cited are straightforward counterexamples to the Epicurean premise, they can be used to challenge it indirectly. I conclude that this familiar Epicurean argument is unsound. (shrink)

Philosophers have said less than is needed about the nature of premature death, and about the badness or otherwise of that death for the one who dies. In this paper, premature death’s nature is clarified in Epicurean terms. And an accompanying argument denies that we need to think of such a death as bad in itself for the one who dies. Premature death’s nature is conceived of as a death that arrives before ataraxia does. (Ataraxia’s nature is also clarified. It (...) is a pervasive inner peace that is a kind of purity and completeness in how one is living.) Whatever harm we might attribute to a premature death is better attributed to a life’s being lived at that time without ataraxia. The paper ends by explaining how its Epicurean account, more so than comparativist or narrativist accounts, could allow a person to know that her death will not be premature. (shrink)

One kind of attempt to defeat the Epicurean conclusion that "death is nothing to us" is the claim that death could be some kind of unexperienced harm. The possibility of such harm is thought to be made plausible by analogy to the possibility of unexperienced harm in life, and it has motivated the invention of many thought experiments which attempt to show that in life one can indeed be harmed without experiencing the harm or its effects in any way. But (...) such attempts fail to weaken the Epicurean conclusion because they fail to appreciate that something which is taken to be an unexperienceable misfortune could, with equal warrant, be claimed to be an unexperienceable good fortune. Indeed, a more accurate claim is that what is unexperienceable is neither good nor bad, but only nothing at all. At the conclusion of the essay I will propose a Principle of Nothing which expresses the Epicurean lesson to be learned from these investigations. (shrink)